Unquiet Things
Unquiet Things
S. Elizabeth has been keeping the jack o' lantern burning this October with her 31 Days of Horror series, but she shares fun, thoughtful writing about all things dark and fabulous 12 months a year!
Hauntology Now! is the Substack of interdisciplinary artist, designer, musician, academic writer, and cultural critic J. Simpson, where he writes about all things hauntological, atemporal, philosophical, as well as sharing thoughts, reflections, and musings on music, movies, books, and life.
October is Christmas, the Superbowl, Sweeps Week, and March Madness all rolled into one for people obsessed with the dark and fantastic, surreal and strange. It’s four weeks and three days where the rest of the world briefly stops thinking your all-night horror movie marathons, yr macabre design schemes, yr unearthly pallor are worth commenting on. ““It must be nice on Halloween to walk around and not have people think you’re strange,” to quote Lucy Montez, the mother of Vanessa Montez, the Siouxsie-worshipping goth/punk teen from Christopher Golden’s All Hallows, which i’ currently reading.
Much like myself, S. Elizabeth is obsessed with all things dark, fabulous, and strange year-round. As the author of Unquiet Things, she writes knowingly about horror movies, TV, books, dark art, fashion, and even perfume. She’s got exquisite taste and deep knowledge and wisdom about a truly impressive array of subjects, yet she never comes across as condescending or gatekeep-y. Whatever she’s writing about, she manages to share keen insights that are every bit as useful for the casually curious as well as the hardened digger, while still managing to be personal, interesting, and entertaining. The way she wraps her insights in personal details from a lifetime of horror obsession is a perpetual source of inspiration to me.
Unquiet Things sub-title is “for kindred glooms,” which definitely includes me (and, i’ll warrant, the readers of this newsletter.) Like Elizabeth, i’m also a lifelong horror obsessive who was afraid of virtually everything when i was little. Also like Elizabeth, i’m also obsessed with the pretty as well as the dark, if not slightly more so. Finding kindred spirits as a horror lover can be tough going, as far too many assume that yr in it to glorify and relish the mayhem, terror, and violence (often against women.) It’s hard to explain that yr in it for the moody aesthetics and to investigate hard truths, however uncomfortable they may be. I am assuredly a kindred gloom, and knowing S. Elizabeth over the last 12 years has made my own writerly journal a much less lonesome fare.
I came to S. Elizabeth’s work via Unquiet Things, but my fandom reached new heights with the publication of her three books, all of which are gloriously curated and expertly annotated volumes of dark and fantastic art. I was fortunate enough to get to feature some of Elizabeth’s writing about the Cat People tarot on my Thespiai blog around the publication of her latest book, The Art of Fantasy. I was already a superfan of her work, but these books kicked things up a notch as I’ve gotten more interested in writing about art.
S. Elizabeth has been keeping up with her yearly tradition of 31 Days of Horror, where she posts something horror-related every day of October. I had been hoping to do something similar, as a devoted horror fanatic, but the pressures of late-stage capitalism have had me busy chasing invoices for the first two weeks of October. Unquiet Things has been a cheery hearth to warm myself by while i’ve been gearing up for my own tsunami of terrors, for which i am eternally grateful. I’ve really enjoyed her recent pieces on Cathy’s Curse, a lesser-known ‘70s freakout, as well as her piece on I Saw the TV Glow, one of my favorite horror movies of the year so far. In that post, she talks about being a gothy outsider in High School, hiding out next to incandescent soda machines during lunch, and how she wishes she could have had a similar kindred spirit when she was that age. For many of us, isn’t that why we got into underground scenes in the first place? It’s a kind of virtual vending machine, an astral version of the outskirts of a party, where introverts gather in hopes of an unlikely connection?
Unquiet Things is just such a gathering place, 365 days a year (sometimes 366.) It’s such a lovely contribution to the culture, a place for decadents and aesthetes to gather, to trade books and tell funny stories. It’s a treasure, as well as a trove of gloomy, magical delights. We’re all better off for having S. Elizabeth in our midst.
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S. Elizabeth Social Media
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